[aaronem]

Hardly an "insane level of politicking", as you like to put it; in a relatively close parallel early in my career, I cost my contracting firm a moderately lucrative client, and verged closely upon getting us sued, out of the same sort of sheer ignorance, as applied to vulnerability reporting rather than feature improvement.

I mean, sure, it would (possibly) be ideal if everyone in our field simply looked at the technical aspects of everything, without any personal or emotional investment whatsoever. What about your experience on this planet has given you to imagine that it's reasonable to expect any aspect of human life, singly or in the large, to be anywhere near ideal?